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Facebook Launches 'Workplace' So You Can Use Facebook At Work For Work (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Facebook's business platform will get an official pricing structure and a new name, Workplace by Facebook, on Monday. The service, a Facebook-hosted office communication tool, has been in the works for more than two years under the name Facebook at Work, but now the company says its enterprise product is ready for primetime. The platform will be sold to businesses on a per-user basis, according to the company: after a three-month trial period, Facebook will charge $3 apiece per employee per month up to 1,000 employees, $2 for every employee beyond up to 10,000 users, and $1 for every employee over that. Workplace links together personal profiles separate from users' normal Facebook accounts and is invisible to anyone outside the office. For joint ventures, accounts can be linked across businesses so that groups of employees from both companies can collaborate. Currently, businesses using Workplace include Starbucks and Booking.com as well as Norwegian telecoms giant Telenor ASA and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Facebook has said it will eventually require for-profit businesses who helped to test the service to pay for it, but it has not picked a date when those businesses' free service will end. Nonprofits such as Oxfam and Save the Children, as well as educational institutions, will continue to use the service at no cost. "We've been amazed by the breadth of organizations who've embraced Workplace -- from a shipping company that can now connect with their ship crews using Live video, to a bank that now uses Workplace instead of fax machines and newsletters to share updates with its distributed bank branches," the company said in its blog post.
Posting AC duh.
My company has been using this for a while now. The upper management all claim to love it. The people who don't understand good web forums, good email usage, etc, love it too; the people with more procedural jobs and less tech knowledge. The people who know how to use email, search mailing lists, etc, think it's crap. Most of IT hate it. So let's compare FB@Work with FB@Home (the one you all know). Many people think it replaces email, which is deluded.
So the good:
Threaded comments
Easy image inlining
OK mobile app
Reasonable search facility (unlike FB@home where you can't find anything later unless you bookmarked it)
If you can get it working, Social Fixer does fix some things on it, it's the same style sheets and JS as FB@Home.
You're paying, so you're not the product being sold any more.
No advertisements (unless your company puts internal stuff, like safety reminder notices or whatever).
The bad:
You have to click many times to read a full set of comments to a post, just like FB@Home. Being treated like a source of click revenue is really annoying.
It's aimed at a single stream of posts. It's hard to filter, there are no user filters (only reading each group at once).
It's hard to save any categories of stuff you like.
People think it's Facebook so they lose all self control and post any random crap that crosses their mind. So your post feed is a mixture of drivel and important things and you can't sort/search/scan easily to find that. You'll miss the quarterly department work priorities announcement between people's cat pictures and selfies doing something cool with a client.
Now way to get data out.
No choice of client, of course - FB web or FB app, no RSS feed or anything like that. You can be emailed comments if you like, like FB@home, but that's it.
The feed goes back about 10 days. Take a fortnight off? You're hosed, you'll never see the things you missed.
There's no way to see "posts in order since I last looked", your last read is not saved. You just have to go back until you get deja vu and realise you read all this already.
Posters expect everyone relevant to it sees their posts. Like FB@Home that doesn't happen, so communication is fragmented. Don't send out major reorg announcements with this, 'cos some people will miss them.
The layout design is fixed, narrow, width. If you have a wide screen you still have to scroll as much as someone on a tiny laptop. It's idiotic.
All your company data now belongs to Facebook and gets sent to the USA.
It's way more effort to read than a decent email setup most of the time, though the comments-with-posting is useful. I frankly think an old- style USENET server would be better (with a web frontend for the under-30s of course). Because it's so much effort to read, and check you haven't missed anything, it's a complete time sink.
The sneaky:
The design is just like FB@Home. Unlikely anyone walking near your computer would spot you were on FB@home wasting time. Have the FB@Work tab by FB@Home and change fast.
Overall the interface is pretty sucky and Facebook haven't got their heads out of their backsides for this any more than FB@Home.
Yup. And when Facebook's stock cratered right after it's IPO (as did Google's), the was dancing in the virtual Slashdot streets. They were certain there were going to be lawsuits, that Facebook would evaporate, etc... Yet, today, it's trading at $130 a share. (And we're still waiting on the Year of Linux on The Desktop.)